Hamlin Garland and Midwest Farm Fiction
UNTIL LATE in the nineteenth century most Americans lived on
farms. Yet it was only when the balance shifted and we became
a predominantly urban nation that farm life began to be treated
seriously in fiction. True, novelists
and short story writers had used the farm as a setting for their
compositions, but it was conventionalized, a convenient locale
for a plot that had little to do with farm life, for characters
who did little actual farm work–or, quite often, who were
city people temporarily domiciled in the country. Such fiction
was only incidentally about the farm, and its setting was the
only feature that distinguished it from other fiction.
Thus writers like Alice Carey and Bayard Taylor sentimentalized
the virtues of rural life, which brought all manner of benefits
to the stereotyped characters who acted out their parts on an
artificially pastoral stage. The occasional book, like Caroline
Matilda Kirkland's A New Home–Who'll Follow? (1839),
that portrayed farm life with a measure of realism did so in
the condescending manner of an urban, educated person who had
little sympathy for the rustics she described, little comprehension
of the social and economic forces that made them what they were.
In the twenty years that followed the Civil War several writers
of fiction, influenced by the vogue of local color, dealt with
rural life–though not necessarily with farm life–with
something like the attention to detail that marked realistic
fiction as it was being practiced by urban writers such as William
Dean Howells. Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Master
(1871), Maurice Thompson's Hoosier Mosaics (1875), and
Edgar Watson Howe's The Story of a Country Town (1884)
are the best known of these transitional works. Eggleston and
Thompson, like the other local colorists, tried to represent
the speech of their characters with some fidelity, and all three
sought to express characteristic rural attitudes–the parochialism
and anti-intellectualism of rural people, for example. But they
did not write about farm life, except incidentally, and their
central characters were not farmers.
The first novelists to deal primarily with farmers and to treat
them realistically were Harold Frederic, whose Seth's Brother's
Wife appeared in 1886, and Joseph Kirkland, whose Zury:
The Meanest Man in Spring County was published the following
year. Since Frederic set his novel in upstate New York, he can
be accorded only passing mention in a literary history of the
American West. Kirkland, however, warrants more attention. Appropriately,
he was a son of Caroline Kirkland, and thus he had the double
advantage of rural experience at an early age and a childhood
environment in which writing was taken seriously. Although only
part of Zury takes place on a farm, it is the most important
part, for it is on an Illinois frontier farm that the boy Zury
learns the lessons of survival that make him the "meanest
man" in later life. Thus not only does Kirkland carefully–too
carefully for modern tastes–reproduce the dialect of the
locale, but he makes the farm environment a force in the story.
Zury, who could so easily have become a caricature, emerges as
a believable human being, at least until he undergoes a transformation
under the influence of Anne Sparrow, the eastern school teacher
whom he eventually marries after the death of his first wife.
Among the people who read the novels just discussed and felt
their influence was Hamlin Garland, a midwestern farm boy who
had gone east to make his way in the very citadel of the eastern
literary establishment, Boston. Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born
September 16, 1860, on a farm in Green's Coulee, just northeast
of Onalaska, Wisconsin. His father, Richard Garland, had come
from Maine and was to move several more times. During the boy's
childhood the family migrated to Iowa and lived successively
on three farms in the northern tier of counties. They stayed
longest in Mitchell County, and it was there, near Osage, that
Garland did most of his growing up. From his experience on the
farm he acquired a distaste for farm work and a vague sense that
the farmer was getting less than his due share of prosperity
for the labor he expended. From his schooling, much of it at
the Cedar Valley Seminary at Osage, he derived a hint of a world
beyond the confines of Mitchell County and, probably, the rudiments
of the intellectual tools that enabled him to find explanations
for the low estate in which the farmer found himself.
After the Garlands had moved once more, to Dakota Territory,
and Hamlin had indulged in a brief fling at homesteading, he
reversed the direction of movement, went to Boston, and continued
his education–not, as he had hoped, at Harvard, but in the
Boston Public Library. Here he discovered, among others, Walt
Whitman, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. In an astonishingly
short time, considering where he started, Garland became a lecturer
and writer. Although some of his lectures were on subjects about
which he really knew very little, he presently began writing
about midwestern farm life, a topic on which he was an authority.
When he wrote the stories later collected in Main-Travelled
Roads (1891), he deliberately set out to correct the picture
of farm life offered in the romantic tales that had predominated
up to then. When editors asked him for charming love stories,
he replied, according to his later reconstruction of the episode,
"No, we've had enough of lies. . . . Other writers are
telling the truth about the city . . . and
it appears to me that the time has come to tell the truth about
the barn yard's daily grind."
The point needs to be made, however, that Garland's early stories
were not simply tracts; the six original stories in Main-Travelled
Roads can stand on their own merits as literature. The irony
is that when Garland's moral fervor waned, so did the quality
of his writing. This is not to say that all his ventures into
social criticism were successful as works of art. Some of the
early short novels, such as A Spoil of Office and Jason
Edwards: An Average Man, both published in 1892, are markedly
inferior to the short stories written about the same time. And
some of his later writings, such as A Son of the Middle Border
(1917), written long after his abandonment of the brand of
realism that he called "veritism," have their own virtues.
Generally speaking, however, there is substance to the critical
view that Garland's career divided itself into a brief, early
period of realism and a long period of romanticism.
The main difficulty with this assumption is that Garland was
writing romantic stories and realistic stories at essentially
the same time, though after Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895)
the former came to dominate. His defiant words about telling
the truth about the barnyard, like those in his literary manifesto
Crumbling Idols (1894), represent one side of Garland,
the side also reflected in Main-Travelled Roads. The other
side, which became more visible after he had achieved a measure
of success, produced such novels as Her Mountain Lover (1901),
The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop
(1902), and Hesper (1903) and the volumes of autobiography
that followed A Son of the Middle Border.
Although Garland will no doubt be remembered chiefly for his
treatment of midwestern farm life, the indignation that led to
the composition of Main-Travelled Roads manifested itself
also in works in which he commented on Indian policy and the
conservation theme. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop and
several short stories (mostly written early but published later
in his career) contain pleas for a more humane and realistic
treatment of the Indians, and Cavanagh: Forest Ranger (1910)
deals with the conflict between the newly established Forest
Service and westerners, especially cattlemen, who resent the
"locking up" of natural resources that they wish to exploit.
Whether Garland is a western writer depends on how broadly we
define "West." When he titles one of the chapters in Crumbling
Idols "Literary Emancipation of the West," he has in
mind primarily the Midwest. Chicago, not Denver, is to be the
literary metropolis of the future. This strident, rather Whitmanesque
call to arms is chiefly an attack on the critical monopoly of
the East–the part of the country over which what Hawthorne
called "the damned shadow of Europe" had fallen most darkly.
The Midwest is the setting for Garland's best writing, in both
fiction and autobiography. Not only are his novels about the
mountain West flawed by romantic overtones, but the author persists
in apologizing for the crudities of local people and contrasting
them unfavorably with the more cultured easterners who often
occupy center stage. In Cavanagh, for example, the heroine
has been educated in the East and finds the raw western town
of Roaring Fork and its people thoroughly disagreeable, except
for a few exotics whose manners and values were formed elsewhere.
So although Garland enjoyed vacationing in the West and riding
the "high trails," he remained, at most, a midwesterner
and in some respects an adoptive easterner.
In his stories of farm life Garland anticipated all of the major
types of farm fiction that appeared in the twentieth century.
His early novels and short stories that plead the farmer's case
foreshadow the novels of social criticism others published in
the twenties and thirties, though by that time Garland's own
views had changed so much that it is doubtful he had much sympathy
for the goals expressed in these novels. The theme of the country
versus the city as a place to carve out one's destiny is anticipated
in Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, in which the heroine renounces
the prospect of a life spent on the farm in favor of marriage
to an urban newspaperman and a career as a city-dweller. The
pioneering venture, which was to occupy the talents of many novelists,
receives Garland's attention in Moccasin Ranch (1909),
based on his homesteading experiences and originally published
in 1894–5 under the title "The Land of the Straddle-Bug."
In most cases, Garland's handling of these themes was superficial
when compared to their later treatment by more skilled writers,
but he at least established the precedents that others were to
develop.
Not only does Garland have some claim to being called the originator
of the midwestem farm novel, but for the first couple of decades
after MainTravelled Roads he was its chief practitioner.
Out of ten works of farm fiction published between 1891 and 1910,
he was the author of six; none of the
others are in any way memorable. A few more
books appeared in the decade from 1911 to 1920, but the only
ones not negligible were two of Willa Cather's early novels and
Dell Munger's The Wind Before the Dawn (1912). Cather
will be treated in another chapter; all that need be said here
is that O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918)
raised farm fiction to an artistic level that it had not previously
reached. The Wind Before the Dawn is not in the same class
with these books, but its theme of the domination of women by
their husbands has a certain contemporary relevance. Although
its feminism is pallid and its artistry slight, it largely avoids
the stereotyped characters and plots that mar the bulk of the
other farm novels published in the same period.
About 1920 midwestern farm novels began to appear in greater
numbers, and from that time until the late 1940s the genre flourished
as never before or since. It can be seen as one evidence of the
heightened regional consciousness of the Midwest (and other regions)
during that period, a consciousness that took a variety of forms
from the Benton-Wood-Curry school of painting to the WPA guides.
In literature it was encouraged by the Midland, a regional
journal founded in 1915 by John T. Frederick, himself the author
of two farm novels in the 1920s. Several farm novelists found
an outlet for their early work, either fiction or poetry, in
the Midland, and its critical essays called for the use
of rural materials in literature and art. Twenty years after
the founding of the Midland, the painter Grant Wood issued
a manifesto titled Revolt Against the City, in which he
echoed, in more sophisticated form, some of the anti-eastern
sentiments Garland had uttered in Crumbling Idols and
specifically called for greater emphasis on the farmer and farm
life as subjects for artistic treatment.
That midwestern regionalism was accomplishing something, at least
quantitatively, by 1924 was evidenced in an article by Weare
Holbrook titled "The Corn Belt Renaissance." "There
is feverish literary activity in the region of the Mississippi
Valley," he noted. "Countless novels are being published,
magazines founded, prizes awarded, in an attempt to establish
a distinctive genre. And a stupendous monotony has been
achieved."
The farm novel of that decade had affinities with historical
fiction, a genre that waxes and wanes in popularity but never
wholly disappears from the American literary scene. Pioneering,
which had already been touched on by Garland and Cather, became
perhaps the dominant theme in novels of the twenties. Early in
the decade, Herbert Quick, who had previously written some children's
books, dealt with the topic in his first significant novel, Vandemark's
Folly (1922). Jacob Vandemark, orphaned at an early
age, comes west from New York and
settles on the Iowa prairie. He is the owner of an unpromising
tract of land, mostly swamp, that has been wished onto him by
a stepfather eager to free himself from all obligation to the
boy. The most memorable passages in the book are the descriptions
of the Old Ridge Road leading west from Dubuque and of the Iowa
prairie before settlement, but Quick also provides a good account
of the growth of a pioneer community.
Jacob Vandemark, well portrayed as a complex personality, overshadows
the rest of the characters and emerges as one of the few really
notable figures in farm fiction. Some of the others, such as
the heroine, Virginia Royall, and the principal villain, J. Buckner
Gowdy, seem to have been drawn from Quick's reading of popular
novels rather than from his experience. The love plot, which
of course ends happily, is a concession to the tastes of his
potential readers. These faults notwithstanding, the book has
distinct merits and makes an important contribution to the literature
of pioneering in the Midwest.
Quick wrote two sequels to Vandemark's Folly: The Hawkeye
(1923) and The Invisible Woman (1924). Perhaps for
the same reason that O. E. Rølvaag's sequels to Giants
in the Earth are inferior to that novel–the pioneering
experience was unique–these novels are less interesting
and less significant than the first one. For one thing, they
have little to say about farming; they concern later phases of
settlement, and most of the action takes place in town. Although
a few characters, notably Roswell Upright, the epitome of political
corruption, stand out, none measure up to Jacob Vandemark. Moreover,
Quick, a lawyer by profession, lets his penchant for the law
take over in long and (for most readers) tedious accounts of
litigation.
Several other Iowa authors contributed to the development of
the farm novel in the 1920s. Besides Margaret Wilson, whose The
Able McLaughlins (1923) is at least on the fringes of historical
fiction, there was Walter J. Muilenburg, who dealt with the pioneering
venture in a book titled Prairie
(1925). An expansion of a short story published
in the Midland during its first year, Prairie tells
how Elias Vaughn, restive under his father's stern regimen, elopes
with a neighbor girl and runs off to Nebraska, the frontier of
the moment. There he and his wife contend with the usual hardships
of settlement on the Great Plains, he to come through the ordeal
victorious in economic terms, she to die of sheer exhaustion
after suffering mental collapse.
Although Muilenburg's handling of the theme of a man and woman
unequal in stamina and in their response to the empty land does
not approach Rølvaag's in Giants in the Earth in
perception, it does offer a comment on the cost of pioneering,
a side of the experience that even Willa Cather had largely neglected.
It also introduces the theme of the conflict
between generations. Elias, whose own experience
should have given him an insight into this problem, alienates
his son, who leaves the farm and unsuccessfully tries his hand
at working in town. When he returns to the farm in defeat, Elias
refuses to allow him back. The generation gap is by no means
an exclusively rural phenomenon, but in farm novels it often
appears, usually in the form of a violent reaction to parental
discipline. The inability of a farm to sustain two or more generations
on the same land provided a ready-made opportunity for dissatisfied
sons and daughters to clear out, either for the West while unoccupied
land was still available or to the
city, where more attractive jobs beckoned.
The farm-versus-city conflict was
the principal theme of several farm novels during the 1920s.
In 1925, for example, two novels, John T. Frederick's Green
Bush and Geoffrey Dell Eaton's Backfurrow, were published,
taking opposite positions on this issue. Frederick, who had already
said a good word for farming in an earlier book, Druida (1923),
defends the virtues of rural life, whereas Eaton condemns the
farm in extreme terms.
Writers as early as Harold Frederic and Kirkland had debunked
the romantic notion of the farm as the repository of virtue,
and Garland had shown the unlovely side of farming. In Rose
of Dutcher's Coolly he had placed his heroine in the position
of having to decide between the farm and the city. Her choice,
which Garland makes as difficult as possible, is in favor of
the city. John T. Frederick set up a parallel situation for Druida
Horsfall, but she renounces the attractions of an urban career,
marries a farm boy, and settles for homesteading in Montana.
The case for the farm, implicit in Druida, is made explicit
in Green Bush. Frank Thompson, the central character,
tries both farm life and city life and finally opts for the former,
despite the temptation of an academic career in the city and
a crippling injury that makes farming especially difficult for
him. Why does he decide as he does? The farm has an almost mystical
attraction for him: "Earth and the plough; an exultant sense
of kinship with elemental things. . . ." Instead of the artificial
trappings of the city, the farm brings him into touch with the
ultimate realities. He is convinced that "prolonged contact
with the earth," has enabled him to confront himself and his
fate with "clearness of vision and with peace of mind."
Frederick himself had experienced a rural childhood and had tried
farming in the Michigan setting of Green Bush. So, although
he finally chose an academic career, he knew enough about the
farm to write with authority. Not everyone with a comparable
background saw things as he did, however. Eaton's Backfurrow,
published within a few months of Frederick's novel, arrives
at an opposite conclusion. His Ralph Dutton grows up on a farm,
handicapped by illegitimacy, escapes to the city, and finally
returns to the farm, not because he wants to but because he must.
His rural background has failed to prepare him for a city job,
and inability to find work drives him back to the country. Trapped
by marriage, he finds himself cut off from any hope of another
try at city life and resigns himself to a life sentence on the
farm.
Like Edgar Lee Masters, Sinclair Lewis, and others of the revolt-from-the-village
school, Eaton lays heavy emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual
starvation of rural life. The farmers Ralph works for and their
wives are characterized by religious hypocrisy, vindictiveness
toward members of their own families, and just plain stupidity.
The whole picture of farm life presented in this book, strongly
naturalistic in tone, is one of unrelieved hopelessness. Apart
from certain weaknesses in characterization and the presence
of unassimilated masses of philosophical material, the novel's
chief failing is this monotony of tone. Whereas Frederick tempers
his affirmative view of farm life by including its bleaker aspects
in his portrayal, Eaton offers a uniformly hostile view, devoid
of any suggestion of possible compensations.
Another writer who looks upon the rural world with a jaundiced
eye is Glenway Wescott, author of two farm novels, The Apple
of the Eye (1924) and The Grandmothers (1927), and
a short story collection, GoodBye Wisconsin (1928). Wescott's
bête noir is the rural evangelical tradition, which
he blames for most of the faults of the society that he depicts.
Together with ambition, their religious heritage twists and thwarts
the people of this society and makes of them grotesques like
the characters in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The
Grandmothers, the best of Wescott's three books, is subtitled
"A Family Portrait" and consists of a series of biographies
of the people whose pictures Alwyn Tower, the central intelligence,
finds in an old family album. To Alwyn, brought up on stories
of and by these people, the past and future seem "years
of misconstrued events, and unreasonable aversions, and useless
ambitions, and nightmares. . . ."
Although Wescott gives some attention to the physical details
of farm life and to characteristically rural attitudes, his condemnation
of American values extends beyond any occupation or region. In
fact, in the introduction to GoodBye Wisconsin he denies
being a regionalist and asserts that "there is no Middle
West. It is a certain climate, a certain landscape; and beyond
that, a state of mind of people born where they do not like to
live."
6
He is familiar with midwestem farm
life, so he uses it as his setting; but his attack is not restricted
to the farm.
The unflattering picture of rural life presented by Eaton and
Wescott places them in a small minority among farm novelists.
Most of those writing in the 1920s either took an upbeat approach,
like Frederick, or blamed the faults of modern farm life on the
intrusion of urban values, in turn the result of the failure
of the younger generation to adhere to the moral principles of
their parents. The latter approach is exemplified by Frederick
Philip Grove's
Our Daily Bread (1928). Although Grove
was a Canadian and the locale of this novel is Saskatchewan,
the moral decay he sees is equally well–Grove would say
better–illustrated in the United States.
The ten children of John and Martha Elliot, pioneers on the Saskatchewan
prairie, have all failed to inherit their parents' qualities
of character and intelligence. Some try farming but do it badly;
others migrate to the city, where they either fail economically
or achieve a measure of financial success but at a disastrous
cost in personal maladjustment. The value system that the parents
endorse and the children repudiate rests on the conviction that
farming is the only truly legitimate occupation for human beings.
Old John Elliot believes that cities and the activities that
go on there are merely bubbles on the sea of life; underneath
these surface manifestations the real business of the human race,
the production of food, goes on. "And this life," he says,
"the life of the vast majority of men on earth, [is] the
essential life of all mankind."
This somewhat narrow economic view (which Grove's autobiography
makes clear he endorses) may not have been held in such uncompromising
form by any significant number of farm novelists, but there were
others who shared his convictions that farming was the most fundamental
of occupations and that the virtues of the pioneer generation
were sadly diluted if not wholly lost in their children. Some
writers, however, saw the economic problems of farming not in
terms of individual weakness but rather as the consequence of
evils in the system–a system designed for the convenience
of the non-farm population, especially those who dealt in the
commodities produced by the farmer. Such writers turned out novels
of social criticism, in which the characters and plot often exist
mainly as the vehicle for the communication of a "message"
calling for economic and political changes that would benefit
the farmer.
Although works of social criticism constitute only a small proportion
of farm novels, two, both dealing with the rise of the Nonpartisan
League, appeared in 1925: Lorna Doone Beers's Prairie Fires
and Lynn Montross's East of Eden. The former deals
with conditions in North Dakota early in the second decade of
the twentieth century, when the farmers felt oppressed and exploited
by the small town merchants and bankers, who were themselves
the tools of powerful milling and railroad interests based in
St. Paul and Minneapolis. When Tom Everly, once a highly successful
flax-grower, is ruined by a drop in price caused by speculation,
he goes about organizing his fellow victims of the system. Betrayed
by the men they have elected to office and ridiculed by these
very legislators when they hold a meeting in the state capital,
they follow Everly's lead and establish the League, which is
moderately successful.
Prairie Fires suffers from
the awkward grafting onto this historically accurate story of
a love affair between a small town banker and the daughter of
one of the farmers involved in the formation of the League. This
plot is rather implausible, and the characterization generally
is less than convincing. The novel is significant, however, because
it portrays with considerable fidelity the hostility between
farmers and small town people, not all of which is the product
of the immediate economic situation. The narrow-mindedness, political
conservatism, and anti-intellectualism of the businessmen are
contrasted with the willingness to experiment and the respect
for education displayed by at least some of the farmers. The
author does not oversimplify the issue, however, or represent
all the farmers as paragons of wisdom and virtue. She includes
the incompetents and shows the difficulties encountered by Everly
and his supporters when they try to organize people unused to
such cooperative endeavors.
The negative side of the Nonpartisan movement predominates in
the other novel on this theme. East of Eden is set in
Illinois, and it describes an unsuccessful attempt to import
political activism from North Dakota. Jack Rothermel was in Bismarck
when the farmers were told to "go home and slop the hogs,"
and he abandoned farming to become a League organizer in other
states. Like Everly in Prairie Fires, he shares center
stage with a basically conservative farmer who becomes convinced
that political organization represents the only hope. There are
other parallels, too, including a romance between the farmer's
daughter and an unworthy town boy, who is not, however, identified
with the merchant-banker group that the farmers are fighting.
The characterization is generally ineffective, and the novel
contains a great deal of melodrama, especially in the ending.
In one sense it is more prophetic than the Beers novel, to which
it is in most respects inferior: the farmers' attempt to organize ends in defeat.
In numerical terms farm fiction
reached a peak in the 1930s. From 1931 through 1940 at least
forty-nine novels about midwestern farm life were published,
as compared to thirty-one in the previous decade. The burgeoning
of farm fiction may have been caused partly by the Depression
and the impact it had on agriculture, but part of it was probably
due simply to the momentum generated in the 1920s–a case
of supply producing demand. The social and economic factors presumably
had something to do with the proliferation of novels of social
criticism, but in the thirties, as earlier, the bulk of farm
fiction carried no overt or covert message but contented itself
with telling a story in a rural setting.
Most of these novels, both good and bad, can be classified as
romantic, in that they center on a conventional love story involving
somewhat idealized characters; some of them are written in a
heightened, poetic style.
Among the contributors to this kind of fiction
were Bess Streeter Aldrich, Dora Aydelotte, Eleanor Blake, Grace
Stone Coates, Josephine Donovan, Mae Foster Jay, Harry Kemp,
Rose Wilder Lane, Martha Ostenso, Phil Stong, and Isabel Stewart
Way. Even within this restricted group qualitative differences
are evident, from the valuable stories of pioneer life by Donovan
and Lane, through the well-crafted but melodramatic novels of
Ostenso, to the trivial work of Aydelotte, Jay, and Stong.
Martha Ostenso is more or less
representative of this group. Like several of the others, she
started writing in the twenties but achieved her greatest output
in the next decade. A prizewinning first novel, Wild Geese
(1925s), started her on a career that led to the writing of eight
novels in nine years and more later, none as successful as the
first. Her technique improved with the passage of time, but her
novels are flawed by a highly colored style, overdramatization
of materials, and a repetitiousness of situation. Moreover, though
a farm setting is used in many of her books, the central characters
are usually outsiders, and the authentic farm figures are often
treated condescendingly. Together with her failure to reflect
characteristic farm attitudes or to deal with the problems of
rural America, these features of
Ostenso's work make it farm fiction only incidentally.
On a distinctly higher artistic
level, yet still emphatically within the romantic tradition,
is Josephine Johnson's Now in November (1934). The Arnold
Haldmarne family struggles to make a living farming, in the face
of the twin handicaps of debt and drought, on rocky, sterile
land that under the best of circumstances would yield but a scanty
livelihood. Although some attention is given to these external
causes of the Haldmarnes' troubles, more is bestowed on the psychological
problems of the characters. Most serious are the neuroses of
the eldest of three daughters, Kerrin, who finally goes insane
and kills herself. Such a conclusion, immediately preceded by
fire and the death of the mother, might seem inevitably to add
up to melodrama, but the author manages to avoid that pitfall
and creates a generally
convincing, if uniformly grim, piece of fiction. Stylistically, Now in November represents
something of an experiment. The highly impressionistic language
employed is the most striking feature of the novel, not entirely
without precedent but more extreme than in any previous example
of farm fiction. It often displays itself in such passages as
this description of the endless round of farm work:
The hope worn on indefinitely . . . the desire never fulfilled . . . four o'clock and the ice-grey mornings . . . the cows and dark . . . the cans enormous in the foggy lamplight
. . . day come up cold and windy . . . the endless cooking .
. . the sour rim of pails. . . . There seemed no answer, and
the answer lay only in forgetting.
8
Although there are risks in such
a style, Johnson handles it skillfully and makes it serve her
purpose and not get out of control.
In sharp contrast to Now in November, in which a great
deal happens in relatively small compass, are the massive, two-and
three-volume works of several other farm novelists of the thirties,
who sought to achieve a convincing picture of farm life by means
of heavy documentation. Some of these writers (though not all)
used their novels as vehicles for comments on the social and
economic plight of the farmer. Structurally, such novels often
took the form of family chronicles like those Glenway Wescott
and others had already done. The rural environment, at least
in earlier times, lent itself better to this device than did
the city, where a family would be quite unlikely to occupy the
same house for several generations.
Early in the decade Leroy MacLeod published two long novels,
The Years of Peace (1932) and The Crowded Hill (1934),
that together cover a thirteen-year period immediately after
the Civil War in the lives of Tyler Peck and his family and friends,
farmers in southern Indiana. Although MacLeod uses a device similar
to John Dos Passos's "Newsreels" to give a sense of what
is going on elsewhere in the nation and the world, the dominant
impression conveyed by the books is one of isolation from the
crosscurrents of history. Attention is centered on the characters'
personal problems, which seldom have any connection with events
in the outside world. In the first novel, the main concern is
the relationship between Tyler and his wife Evaline, neither
of whom has married for love, and in The Crowded Hill the
main plot revolves about the conflict between Evaline and Tyler's
Aunt Mary, who has come to live with them.
MacLeod effectively recreates the lifestyles of a certain time
and place by the piling up of enormous masses of detail on the
way people lived, how they talked (though he does not go overboard
in his handling of dialect), how they felt and thought about
their lives. The reader can learn a great deal about the amusements
and recreations of the people, the importance of religion and
politics to them, and nearly everything else that the imaginative
use of diaries, letters, and historical records can recover from
an era so long past. Such massive documentation sometimes threatens
to overshadow the story line but never quite does so. The characters
are real, their conflicts believable, and the resolutions of
these conflicts acceptable. Yet the reader may be left with the
feeling that not much really happens in
these books. The round of the seasons and the
gradual changes that take place in the community collectively
dwarf the lives of the central characters and leave the reader
with the feeling that the background looms larger than the characters
and plot.
Arthur Pound has made similar use of the Michigan countryside
to tell the Mark family saga in Once a Wilderness (1934)
and Second Growth (1935). More in the family chronicle
tradition than MacLeod's novels and covering a longer span of
time, these books give less the impression of historical fiction.
The earlier novel is superior to its successor, chiefly because
it is dominated by old John Mark, widowed patriarch of the family
and one of the most completely individualized characters in modern
farm fiction. When he sinks into senility and dies in the second
book, there is a falling-off of narrative power and reader interest.
In both novels there are a great many Marks, including several
named John, and the reader must have frequent recourse to the
genealogical chart at the end in order to keep them straight.
Pound's novels make much less use of background material than
MacLeod's do, and there is greater stress on the doings of the
characters, some quite lurid. Hence the reader has less knowledge
of the society that shaped the characters and less comprehension
of why they are as they are. The main virtue of the books is
the characterization of old John Mark. By contrast, his descendants
are less interesting as well as less praiseworthy. Nonetheless,
Pound does as well as many other farm novelists and better than
most at chronicling the changes that occur in a community by
emphasizing how these changes affect a single family group.
A more significant figure than either MacLeod or Pound in the
development of the midwestern farm novel was Sophus Keith Winther,
author of three novels known collectively as the Grimsen trilogy:
Take All to Nebraska
(1936), Mortgage Your Heart (1937), and This Passion
Never Dies (1938). In this series he traces the experiences
of Peter and Meta Grimsen, Danish immigrants to the Nebraska
prairie, and their sons. Their attempts to farm successfully
in the new environment are largely failures. Besides the natural
hindrances–drought, grasshoppers, blizzards–they are
handicapped by their status as foreigners, unable even to speak
English, and by the greed of landlords and a grasping moneylender,
their countryman Jacob Paulsen. After enduring more than the
usual spate of misfortunes and losing their first farm, the Grimsens
are taken pity on and are able to start over again on a new and
better farm at the end of the first novel. Moreover, they finally
decide to take out American citizenship, having intended through
most of the book to go back to Denmark after making their fortune
in America.
But this "happy ending" is deceptive when seen from the
perspective of the trilogy as a whole, for further misfortunes
bring them down to final defeat in the post–World War I
agricultural depression. Peter dies just before he is to leave the farm on which he has
lavished his attention over a period of nearly twenty years.
Meanwhile, the sons, not handicapped by their parents' immigrant
status, achieve, in varying degrees, a modest measure of temporary
success. Hans, the youngest, who serves as the central intelligence,
goes to the university and is attracted to socialism and pacifism
about the time of World War I. All three sons marry, and all
three experience more or less of marital difficulty; the wives
of both Hans and Alfred die, and Hans remarries, his new wife
the daughter of the man who is buying up farms at mortgage sales.
The third book ends in total defeat for the older generation
and with only the feeblest ray of hope for their children.
More than either MacLeod or Pound, Winther writes realistically,
even naturalistically. Neither character nor setting is idealized
in the least. Unlike the Norwegians of O. E. Rølvaag,
Winther's Danes have little contact with religion, and the boys
learn to swear (in both Danish and English) and to chew tobacco
at an early age. The conflict of this immigrant group with the
Americans is scarcely more ruthless than the clashes among the
Danes themselves. As an adherent to the naturalistic philosophy
of determinism, Winther tries to hew to the cause-and-effect
line. He does not always succeed, however, and at times elements
of melodrama enter the story. His style, especially in the first
novel, is unpolished and hence undistinguished. Despite these
faults, the Grimsen trilogy is an important milestone in the
development of midwestern farm fiction.
At the end of the decade came an even more important contribution
to the farm novel in the Mantz family trilogy of Paul Corey:
Three Miles Square (1939), The Road Returns (1940),
and County Seat (1941). Left a widow at the beginning
of her first book, Mrs. Mantz sets about planning her four children's
futures. Because she perceives "success" in urban terms,
she determines that each child will manage the farm until the
age of twenty-one, then go away to college as the next in line
takes over the job. The plan never works out, however, for Andrew,
the eldest, is forced to leave college and is drafted into the
army in World War I. When he returns, he is no longer interested
in further education, and the next two have no wish to stay on
the farm. Since the remaining son, Otto, is too young to run
the farm, his mother sells it. Otto dutifully goes off to college
when it is his turn and takes a job with a telephone company
upon graduation. But what really attracts him is farming. So
when the buyer is unable to make payments on the farm and it
comes back to the Mantzes, Otto, who has lost his job in the
Depression, willingly returns home to begin the only career that
interests him.
Although Corey's novels have a good deal to say about the economic
problems that beset farming in the years from 1910 to 1930, their
chief message is that farming is a legitimate occupation, fully
as much so as the
white-collar jobs that Mrs. Mantz hopes to
see her children enter. Like John Frederick in the previous decade,
Corey makes a strong case for the farm as a place to live and
for farming as a way to make a living. He concedes, however,
that it is not for everyone. Otto is the only member of the family
who responds to the beauty of a cornfield; the others look upon
the farm with feelings that range from unenthusiastic acceptance
to positive loathing. Otto has seen enough of city life to have
become skeptical of its supposed advantages. City jobs usually
involve exploiting someone else. By contrast, as he tells his
mother, "There's a chance for honor and success and respectability
in making it into a good farm. . . . I don't see why the production
of food isn't as respectable as sitting in an office with my
name on the door, producing nothing."
Corey does not hit the reader over the head with this moral,
however. It takes him three books to say it because he is determined
to let the message speak for itself through the action of the
novels, rather than impose it on the reader. The pace of these
novels is slow compared to the work of Frederick and Eaton in
the 1920s. They amount to a social and economic history of Iowa
during the decades covered, though attention remains focused
on the Mantzes throughout. They are not unusual people in any
way. In fact, none of the major characters, with the possible
exception of Ed Crosby, could be described as exceptional in
either intelligence or character. One reviewer of County Seat
commented that "the novel achieves distinction through
virtue of its accent on mediocrity; through Corey's deeprooted
respect for the dignity and endeavors of ordinary men."
10
In his emphasis on average rather than exceptional people and
in his use of incremental detail to build up his case, Corey
resembles such naturalistic writers as James T. Farrell. He is
thoroughly familiar with farm life as it was lived during the
period covered by the trilogy and gives much attention to the
everyday activities of his people, who act and speak like Iowa
farmers of that time. Matters only touched on in other farm novels,
such as the conflict between old and new methods of farming and
between the old individualism and the new interdependence, are
given the prominence they deserve in a realistic portrait of
farming in the first third of the twentieth century. If the trilogy
has a weakness, it is a lack of emotional intensity, resulting
from the superabundance of detail, which at times obscures the
plot line. But in most respects Corey brings the farm novel to
a level it had not previously reached.
In the 1940s Corey published one more novel, Acres of Antaeus (1946), which represented something of a falling-off from his performance in the Mantz trilogy. In those books he had allowed a farmer named Ed Crosby to speak out in favor of collective
action among farmers, instead of the individualism that had so
often handicapped them in their dealings with more highly organized forces. In Acres of Antaeus
this theme is developed further, but the organization and
direction are provided, not by small farmers, but by a corporation
called MidWest Farms, Inc. The main character, Jim Buckly, takes
a job with MidWest, though his sympathies are with the farmers,
including his father-in-law, who is one of the victims of MidWest's
expansionist policies. The resolution is not likely to be satisfying
to readers who share Buckly's (and Corey's) sympathies, for,
although a change in management at MidWest modifies some of the
company's exploitative policies, it still exists, and Buckly
is still working for it at the end of the novel. Shorter than
any of the Mantz books, Acres of Antaeus tries to do too
much and largely fails to accomplish what it sets out to do.
Corey's last novel came out at a time when the great era of farm
fiction was ending. Fewer than half as many novels were published
in the years from 1941 to 1950 as in the previous decade, and
the number published in the last half of the decade of the forties
was less than half the number published in the first five years.
The distraction of World War II may account in some degree for
this diminution, but it does not explain the continuing decline
in the years after the war. Since the decline continued in the
following decades, it is evident that deeper underlying factors
were at work. One may speculate that the rapid changes in farming
after World War II, together with the dwindling of farmers into
an ever-smaller minority of the population, has had some impact
on the potential audience for farm fiction. The novel of pioneering
diminished sharply as the age of settlement receded into the
past beyond the actual experience of any considerable body of
readers, and something of the same sort may have happened to
the farm novel in general.
Ironically, farm fiction reached new heights qualitatively just
as it was slipping quantitatively. Besides the work of Paul Corey,
the late thirties and the forties saw the entrance on the scene
of such writers as Herbert Krause and Frederick Manfred, both
discussed elsewhere in this book. Krause's Wind Without Rain
(1939) and The Thresher (1946) and Manfred's This
Is the Year (1947) represent in many ways the culmination
of the farm novel. In the 1950s came other notable works, such
as Jonathan Fields's The Memoirs of Dunstan Barr and Gordon
Webber's What End but Love, both published in 1959. In
1962 came Curtis Harnack's Love and Be Silent and Lois
Phillips Hudson's The Bones of Plenty, and in 1975 there
was Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall, which, though
a village and small town story for the most part, does include
some farm sequences. Interestingly, all of the last three are
set, in part, in North Dakota, a state largely neglected by earlier
farm novelists.
The first two of these novels fall into the category of family
chronicles. Dunstan Barr, who inherits a seven-hundred-acre Illinois
farm, has a yen for
farming but winds up spending most of his life
as a banker. His "memoirs" concern not only his own life
but those of his brothers, sisters, children, and other relatives.
It is a slow-moving narrative, and, though the characters suffer
a certain amount of tragedy, there is little that could be called
dramatic about the novel.
The setting of What End but Love is the Michigan farm
of Holly Hobart, on Memorial Day, 1934. Most of the action consists
of flashbacks recounting the lives of Holly's numerous relatives,
who have come together for what turns out to be the last family
reunion on the old place, about to be sold to an auto company
in nearby Flint. All seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere
and to be living lives of unfulfilled expectations. This theme
of comparative failure among people, many of whose external aspects
suggest success, together with the theme of the displacement
of rural values by urban ones, unifies a somewhat sprawling novel.
The style is polished, and the characters, varied though they are, achieve credibility.
The relationships among members
of a family are explored, on a smaller scale, by Curtis Harnack
in Love and Be Silent. The protagonists are a brother
and sister, Robert and Alma Schneider, each of whom marries rather
unwisely. Each claims to understand the other's marital problems,
but neither is able to help the other to any significant degree.
There is more about farming, in Iowa and North Dakota, than in
the two novels just discussed, but attention is focused on the
characters' emotional problems, not on the difficulties of farming
except in so far as these aggravate the personal maladjustments.
The Bones of Plenty is another treatment of farm life
in the 1930s, on the prairies of North Dakota. Besides the twin
evils of drought and depres-sion, George Armstrong Custer is
handicapped by some of the personality traits associated with
his famous namesake: he is rash, impulsive, and overly optimistic.
Equally scornful of government programs and collective action
by farmers, he tries to rely on his own abilities, takes long
chances, and fails. Although the novel is about the "farm
problem," no solution is offered. The author reminds her readers
that for many farmers the depression has never ended. Like Mrs.
Hudson's short stories, the novel is skillfully written. It consists
of a series of episodes, many of them drawn from her own experience.
One is reminded of the Saskatchewan prairie sequences in Wallace
Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain. George Custer has
much in common with Bo Mason, and his family suffers the consequences.
Those portions of Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall
that qualify as farm fiction deserve at least passing mention
as showing what can be done with rural material by a talented
contemporary writer. The book's subtitle, "A Family Album,"
suggests that it belongs in the same class as Wescott's The
Grandmothers, and there are similarities between the two.
Only the first few chapters of a long book have much to do with
farming. The story begins in 1935, when Charles Neumiller returns
to the North Dakota farm where he grew up. His father has just
died, and Charles has come back to bury him and to comfort his
spinster sister, who has passed up marriage to keep house for
her father. The story then shifts to Charles's son Martin, who
has grown up on the farm but who goes away to college and becomes
a high school teacher and administrator, first in North Dakota,
later in Illinois.
Like several other recent examples of farm fiction, Beyond
the Bedroom Wall employs some of the experimental techniques
that novelists in the second half of the twentieth century have
evolved. In this respect it illustrates the willingness of farm
novelists to adopt literary modes that have already become established
in other fiction, together with their reluctance to take the
lead in innovation. In general, the farm novel has tended to
follow other fiction at a distance of a decade or more in matters
of technique, perhaps because of a belief that its potential
audience would not respond well to innovation.
The farm novel is not dead, in the Midwest or elsewhere. So long
as people continue to live on farms and so long as farm life
differs perceptibly from life in town, it will continue to be
reflected in fiction. But it is probably safe to say that the
great days of the farm novel are over. It flourished in the two
decades between world wars and has been declining, quantitatively,
ever since. One might hazard the guess that the farm novel of
the future will be less distinctive than in the past, as farm
life comes to resemble ever more closely life elsewhere. In the
future, as in the past, however, farm fiction should serve the
function that Paul Corey (speaking through Otto Mantz) assigned
to it at the end of his trilogy: to enable the people of different
sections of the country to know one another more intimately.
ROY W. MEYER, Mankato State University
1. Hamlin Garland, A Son of
the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1944)
p. 376.
2. Garland also wrote several essays on the
Indians. The best have been edited, with a useful introduction,
by Lonnie E. Underhill and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., in Hamlin
Garland's Observations on the American Indian, 1895–1905
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).
3. Weare Holbrook, "The Corn Belt Renaissance," Forum 72 (July 1924): 118.
4. John T. Frederick, Green Bush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), pp. 237, 301.
5. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), p. 15
6. Glenway Wescott, GoodBye Wisconsin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), p. 39.
7. Frederick Philip Grove, Our
Daily Bread (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 78.
8. Josephine Johnson, Now in November (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1934), p. 38.
9. Paul Corey, County Seat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941) p. 377.
10. Rose Feld, "Iowa Town," New York Times Book Review, September 7, 1941, p. 22.
Fiction by Hamlin Garland
Autobiography by Hamlin Garland
Boy Life on the Prairie. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
Other Significant Farm Fiction
Beers, Lorna Doone [Mrs. C. R. Chambers]. Prairie Fires. New York: Dutton, 1925.
Corey, Paul. Acres of Antaeus. New York: Holt, 1946.
Eaton, Geoffrey Dell. Backfurrow. New York: Putnam's, 1925.
Fields, Jonathan. The Memoirs of Dunstan Barr. New York: Coward-McCann, 1959.
Frederick, John T. Druida. New York: Knopf, 1923.
Grove, Frederick Philip. Our Daily Bread. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
Harnack, Curtis. Love and Be Silent. New York: Harcourt, 1962.
Hudson, Lois Phillips. The Bones of Plenty. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.
Johnson, Josephine. Now in November. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934.
Kirkland, Joseph. Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887.
MacLeod, Leroy. The Crowded Hill. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934.
Montross, Lynn. East of Eden. New York: Harper, 1925.
Muilenburg, Walter J. Prairie. New York: Viking, 1925.
Munger, Dell H. The Wind Before the Dawn. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1912.
Ostenso, Martha. Wild Geese. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925.
Pound, Arthur. Once a Wilderness. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934.
Quick, Herbert. Vandemark's Folly. New York: A. L. Burt, 1922.
Suckow, Ruth. Country People. New York: Knopf, 1924.
Webber, Gordon. What End but Love. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.
Wescott, Glenway. The Grandmothers. New York: Harper, 1927.
Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins. New York: Harper, 1923.
Winther, Sophus Keith. Mortgage Your Heart. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
Woiwode, Larry A. Beyond the Bedroom Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975.
Critical and Historical Studies
Andrews, Clarence A. A Literary History of Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972. Treats Corey, Frederick, Garland, Harnack, Muilenburg, Quick, Suckow, Wilson, and other writers of Iowa farm fiction.
Atherton, Lewis. Main Street on the Middle Border. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1954. General cultural history, with emphasis on
the small town.
Bailey, L. H. "Can Agriculture Function in Literature?" Midland 4 (May-June 1918): 103–105. Predicts a "bold artistic literature that shall express
the marrow of rural civilization" when the sociological analysis
of farm life has been completed.
Baker, Joseph E. "Regionalism
in the Middle West." American Review 4 (March
1935): 603–614. Observations primarily on Ruth Suckow.
Clark, John Abbot. "The Middle West–There It Lies." Southern
Review 2 (Winter 1937): 462–472. The Midwest cried for more Rølvaags
and Cathers but was "visited instead by a plague of photographers."
Commager, Henry Steele. "The Literature of the Pioneer West." Minnesota
History
8 (December 1927): 319–328. Traces literary treatment of
pioneering, sees Giants in the Earth as "first time
a novelist has measured the westward movement with a psychological
yardstick and found it wanting."
Crawford, Nelson Antrim. "The
American Farmer in Fact and Fiction." Literary
Digest International Book Review 4 (December 1925 and January
1926): 25–26,
28; 100–101. Sees farm fiction as less sentimental and more
realistic in early
1920s; praises Frederick's Green Bush as example of recent
trends.
Dondore, Dorothy. The Prairie and the Making of Middle
America. Cedar Rapids:
Torch Press, 1926. Touches on fiction of the midwestern frontier.
Dougherty, Charles T. "Novels of the Middle Border: A Critical
Bibliography for Historians." Historical Bulletin 25 (May
1947): 77–78, 85–88. Broader than the title suggests,
offers critical comment on several novels of pioneer life.
Duffey, Bernard I. "Hamlin Garland's `Decline' from Realism." American
Literature
25 (March 1953): 69–74. Garland wrote what magazines would
publish: realism and reform for Arena, romance for Century,
et al.
Flanagan, John T. "A Bibliography of Middle Western Farm
Novels." Minnesota
History 23 (June 1942): 156–158. Accompanies article
listed below.
Frederick, John T. "The Farm
in Iowa Fiction." Palimpsest 32 (March 1931):
121–152. Discusses Suckow, Garland, and other novelists
of Iowa farm life.
Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing
Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama. Chicago: Stone & Kimball,
1894. Manifesto of
Garland's form of realism, which he called "veritism."
Grove, Frederick Philip. A Search for America. New York: Louis
Carrier, 1928. Autobiography, provides background for Grove's novel Our Daily
Bread (q.v.).
Henson, Clyde E. Joseph Kirkland. New
York: Twayne, 1962. Useful for information
on background of Zury (q. v. ).
Holbrook, Weare. "The Corn
Belt Renaissance." Forum 72 (July 1924): 118–120.
Unsympathetic view of recent midwestern literature.
Holloway, Jean. Hamlin Garland: A Biography. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1960. Based heavily on Garland's correspondence with his publishers.
Hutton, Graham. Midwest at Noon. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1946.
The Midwest as seen by an English visitor.
McAvoy, Thomas T., ed. The Midwest: Myth or Reality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1961. Collection of essays, including contributions by John T.
Flanagan and John T. Frederick.
Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western
Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Standard survey of the subject.
Miller, Charles T. "Hamlin
Garland's Retreat from Realism." Western American Literature
1 (Summer 1966): 119–129. Attributes Garland's flirtation
with romance to public taste and his own need for an income.
Morlan, Robert L. Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan
League 1915–1922. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1955. Historical background for novels by Beers and Montross
(qq.v.).
Pizer, Donald. Hamlin Garland's
Early Work and Career. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1960. Best treatment to date of the portion of Garland's
career in which most of his farm fiction was written.
Powell, Desmond. "Sophus Winther: The Grimsen Trilogy." American
Scandinavian Review 36 (June 1948): 144–147. Survey of Winther's
chief novels of farm life.
Quick, Herbert. One Man's Life. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925. Autobiography, providing background for Vandemark's Folly (q. v. ) and other novels.
Sherman, Caroline B. "The Development
of American Rural Fiction." Agricultural History 12 (January
1938): 67–76. Chronological survey, starting with Edward
Eggleston and Edgar Watson Howe, continuing with Garland and
the early novels of pioneering, and concluding with regional
studies of the 1920s and
1930s. Sees two major types: family chronicle and "problem
novel."
Smith, Henry Nash. "The Western
Farmer in Imaginative Literature." Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 36 (December 1949): 479–490.
Despite cult of western
yeoman, serious fiction rarely gave him much attention.
Suckow, Ruth. Carry-Over. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.
Suckow's introduction to this collection of stories denies that
her farm fiction was intended as either "indictment [or]
celebration" or that social criticism was her primary motive.
The Book of the American Indian. New York: Harper, 1923.
The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. New York: Harper, 1902.
Cavanagh: Forest Ranger. New York: Harper, 1910.
Her Mountain Lover. New York: Century, 1901.
Hesper. New York: Harper, 1903. Jason Edwards: An Average Man. Boston: Arena, 1892.
Main-Travelled Roads. Boston: Arena, 1891.
Moccasin Ranch: A Story of Dakota. New York: Harper, 1909.
Prairie Folks. Chicago: Schulte, 1893.
Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895.
A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Boston: Arena, 1892.
A Daughter of the Middle Border. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
Roadside Meetings. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
A Son of the Middle Border. New York: Macmillan, 1917.
. County Seat. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941.
. The Road Returns. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940.
. Three Miles Square. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1939.
. Green Bush. New York: Knopf, 1925.
. The Years of Peace. New York: Century, 1932.
. Second Growth. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935.
. Take All to Nebraska. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
. This Passion Never Dies. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
. "The Middle Western Farm Novel."
Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 113–147. Important
ground-breaking article, sets up criteria and categories used
by subsequent critics.
."Ruth Suckow
and the Middle Western Literary Movement." English Journal
20 (January 1931): 1–8. Primarily about Suckow, whom
he finds reacting against earlier romanticism in rural fiction.
. "Naturalism
in American Farm Fiction." Journal of the Central Mississippi
Valley American Studies Association 2 (Spring 1961): 27–37.
Discusses Corey,
Eaton, Winther, and others.
. "The Scandinavian
Immigrant in American Farm Fiction." American Saundinavian Review 47 (September 1959): 243–249.
Discusses Cather,
Rølvaag, Winther, and others.
. "Rural Literature
Faces Peace." South Atlantic Quarterly 42 (January 1943):
59–71. Predicts that after fallow period during World War
II the farm novel will revive, better than ever.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.